For many marketers and creators, the process of creating branded content can feel like swimming against an endless tide of emails, rife with complex coordination. In an effort to solve this, a group of Kiwi entrepreneurs created Otterfish, a revolutionary platform promising to make light work of what could be a headache-inducing process.
With first-hand experience coordinating user-generated content campaigns, award-winning TV presenter, founder of talent management company WeAreTENZING, and now Otterfish Co-Founder and CEO, Brooke Howard-Smith, is all too familiar with the pain points associated with the branded content creation process and brings a wealth of experience in the influencer industry.
Having been a part of one of New Zealand’s leading creator management companies, Brooke oversaw the execution of 650 campaigns annually. Through this experience, he recognised the pivotal role that effective communication plays in the success of such campaigns. To address this, he collaborated with a team of skilled developers to create a streamlined and intelligent solution for agencies, brands, and creators in the influencer industry.
Despite influencer/content generation becoming an increasingly popular channel for many brands, Brooke says that how the brand-talent-agency model is currently being run is not cost-effective for all parties involved.
“When you are in the process of communicating about a campaign to every one of those players from the brand, to the agency, the agency to the talent agency, talent agency to the creator, there might be up to 70 emails in between each of those to get a single campaign, maybe a 30-second Instagram story off the ground and live. While it’s often effective, it’s also incredibly time-consuming,” Brooke says.
And in this game, time is money.
To assist with the design process, Brooke and his team utilised their connections of almost 1,000 people across all parts of the industry, to conceptualise and deliver a better solution to real-life challenges faced when producing user-generated content.
“We know that brands absolutely want user generated content, third-party endorsement of influencers. It’s really important and it’s still growing rapidly.
“The challenge of this is how do you get four aligned, but very different, groups collaborating at rapid speed. Influencer marketing is about being able to build a campaign in less than a couple of weeks and coordinate that in a really tight timeline, yet still not risk your brand.”
The goal of Otterfish is to streamline the influencer content approval process, which previously relied on a combination of emails, Dropbox, and Google Drive shared among various parties, including the brand, agency, talent agency, and creator unit. Otterfish simplifies this process by consolidating it into a single platform where everyone can communicate within their own “permission silos.”
By nature each campaign has a “pretty heavy friction process” Brooke says. “Each of those branded content campaigns are effectively a mini campaign with a creator who’s like an agency, but potentially not as experienced. And that particular process of proposal, a briefing, proposal, approval, is really intense.”
With Otterfish, the process of uploading the brief, proposing the content and approving the content happens using a modern communication methodology which includes a chat function.
“A lot of the time you don’t need an email to ask, ‘How’s this going?’ You just need chat. We have partition chat boxes so that each of the players in the process can talk to each other in a permissioned way,” says Brooke.
A specially designed AI has also been embedded to read the brief and help the content creator generate ideas, key words and hash tags that will help drive the campaign’s success. The AI generated tool can also help create captions ideas based on the concept provided.
From there a content creator can present their concept for approval before submitting the final version and then uploading it.
This AI can also be trained to have a clear understanding of a brands aesthetic and tone to ensure each campaign remains consistent.
“Your 22-year-old social media intern is no longer going to be terrified that they’re going to go outside of the brand parameters, because your digital brand assistant, which is really what AI is turning into, will have a strong understanding of your brand and how best to reach those customers and communicate with them,” Brooke says.
Recognising that many influencers are Millennials or Gen Z’s and therefore very comfortable with a phone in hand, the creators of Otterfish knew it was important the platform was optimised for both mobile and desktop.
And now after two years of work by a team of top-notch software designers and developers from Ukraine who gave it their all, Otterfish is finally ready to be released into the world.
By finding a smart solution that eases multiple pain points and works with creators to create better, more effective content faster, Brooke believes Otterfish has the potential to be “completely disruptive” in the industry.
“The idea that we are empowering these incredible people to build a real professional business around their content, that’s really exciting,” he says.
Try Otterfish for free today by visiting www.otterfish.com
